How to manage scarce resources globally

CSH’s J. Stephen Lansing and Stefan Thurner took a closer look at the cooperative management of rice terraces in Bali and developed a model that shows that adaptation in a coupled human-natural system can trigger self-organized criticality (SOC). Together with their co-authors they published their findings in the PNAS article Adaptive self-organization of Bali’s ancient rice terraces. Adaptive SOC is a self-organizing process where local adaptations drive the system toward local and global optima. Steve Lansing, CSH External Faculty, will be visiting the Hub during the last two weeks in June and will give a talk on June 27 at 4pm at the Hub.

Spatial patterning often occurs in ecosystems as a result of a self-organizing process caused by feedback between organisms and the physical environment. In this paper, they show that the spatial patterns observable in centuries-old Balinese rice terraces are also created by feedback between farmers’ decisions and the ecology of the paddies, which triggers a transition from local to global-scale control of water shortages and rice pests. Lansing et al propose an evolutionary game, based on local farmers’ decisions that predicts specific power laws in spatial patterning that are also seen in a multispectral image analysis of Balinese rice terraces. The model shows how feedbacks between human decisions and ecosystem processes can evolve toward an optimal state in which total harvests are maximized and the system approaches Pareto optimality. It helps explain how multiscale cooperation from the community to the watershed scale could persist for centuries, and why the disruption of this self-organizing system by the Green Revolution caused chaos in irrigation and devastating losses from pests. The model shows that adaptation in a coupled human–natural system can trigger self-organized criticality (SOC). In previous exogenously driven SOC models, adaptation plays no role, and no optimization occurs. In contrast, adaptive SOC is a self-organizing process where local adaptations drive the system toward local and global optima

Klimek, Hanel, and Kautzky-Willer on optimal gender-specific treatment

CSH Associate Faculty Peter Klimek and Rudolf Hanel from MUW, partnered up with the Austrian Researcher of the Year 2016 Alexandra Kautzky-Willer to take a closer look on gender related differences in the treatment of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) like cardiovascular diseases or cancers. The study is titled “Optimal gender-specific treatment paths on healthcare multiplex networks”. Their goal is clear: They intend to contribute to more stringent considerations of gender differences in the treatments of NCDs and thus to better targeted, more patient oriented and more efficient therapeutic approaches which contribute to cost reductions and the better allocation of resources.